Album Reviews

Aimee Mann’s pensive, surreal walk through a littered landscape of love gone wrong, double dealings, temptations (drugs and otherwise) and painful breakups (not hers— she’s still married to Michael Penn last time I checked) owes a great deal conceptually and lyrically to Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom—at least to my ears. You can almost hear El singing “Guys Like Me” and “Invisible Ink.”

Record collectors are demented and sad-- obsessive- compulsive freaks that only have one thing on their minds; the next record they need. You see, "want" is only for the completely normal and well adjusted individual who went to the mall to pick up U2's latest but came home happily instead with a totally rippin' new shirt from Old Navy. Lucky shit- bet he even has a girlfriend and a cool car.

In the nervous, jumpy, wiry world of guitar-driven late ‘70’s-early ‘80’s post-rock intellectual punk, popularized by bands like Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, early XTC and (more broodingly) Wire, Mission of Burma was America’s premier practitioners. They probably accrued more legend than record sales, though.

Whatever fans might hope for on a McCartney album is here: thoughtful pop tunes, accomplished melodic invention, focused, meticulous production and comforting glints of The Beatles. More importantly, what McCartney detractors (including the Beatles fans among them) might expect is missing: namely sugary confections, shlock-rock, and corny lyrics.

"My girlfriend loves everything at the beach except the sand, the surf and the sun."  That lyric pretty much sums up the playful, sensous, and dangerous kitsch-world of this exotic six person  L.A. group fronted by the black widow spider persona of the sexy Cambodian pop chantreuse Chhom Nimol whose fixation with '60s Cambodian pop fuels the music.